Arts in The NEK

Details

Created on Thursday, 12 May 2016 14:03

Written by Tim Laroche

ISSUES

The cafeteria at the Lyndon Town School buzzed with people for three days in mid-December for the Burklyn Craft Fair.

All along the halls leading to the main craft area, vibrant orange, pink and blue matting paper stood in stark contrast to the white walls of the school.

Susan Gallagher popped out from behind a corner in the kitchen area of the cafeteria. As the president of the Burklyn Arts Council, she seemed to be occupied by a hundred things at once.

Gallagher and the other members of the Burklyn Arts Council and an army of volunteers are busy setting up for their annual Holiday Craft Fair. The fair is one of two main events that the council holds each year to raise money. Their cause: arts in schools.

Gallagher says the group consists primarily of artists who want to support the education for future generations of students.

“Burklyn Arts Council supports the development and the appreciation for the arts in schools and towns in Caledonia North [Supervisory Union,]” Gallagher said.

The group accomplishes this by raising money for the schools through craft fairs and memberships.

“We’ve been doing this since 1974, it worked in different ways in the 46 years. We have two craft fairs per year we do encourage memberships, but they’re a very small source of income. But the fairs are our central source of income.”

Schools in the area can apply to the council for grants from the council during the school year on a monthly basis. Gallagher says the council budgets between $20,000 and $50,000 each year to support arts in the schools.

“We buy tickets for professional performances, we pay for artists residencies and we sometimes help with school budgets for maybe a school art teacher for a film developer,” Gallagher said. “I remember, years ago, for Lyndon Town School, we bought a marimba.”

With more than 40 volunteers signing up to help put on the fair this year, it seems that the area school have a friend in their local arts council. But in many of the schools in the Caledonia North Supervisory Union, the funding from the Burklyn Arts Council provides a substantial portion of their budget.

Despite the image of an idyllic art room, where children can grow and develop as artists, many of the art rooms in the Northeast Kingdom do not match up with the ideal.

The scene for arts education in the NEK is riddled with a set of unique challenges, but it isn’t the only discipline to encounter periodic setbacks. As one of the disciplines that make up the so-called allied arts – which also include Home Economics, Physical Education, Music, Industrial Arts, and many other fields – visual arts are often underfunded, underutilized, overscheduled, or at times even neglected by school systems.

To be fair, many schools in the NEK are reeling for the basic funding to sustain their other programs, and many art educators and advocates say that the problems that art teachers in the region face are, in many cases, due to the simple reality that schools see the subject as less important than others that they are federally required to offer.

But the circumstances that gave rise to the current educational scene in the NEK are largely factors of broader economic problems facing the region.